Greg Hamerton | fantasy author

Criticism is always hard to take, and I have great respect for Mr Donaldson as a writer. But this book is crushed to death under its own weight and it drags the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant down with it.

I review it not to point my presumptuous little finger at a great writer’s faults, but to try and understand why the book itself has lost me as a reader, so I can avoid this style of writing in my own fantasy novels. It’s particularly instructive for me, because I deal with similar themes in Second Sight, on a similar stage, with similar stakes (a world wracked with chaos; a female mage striving to save the essence of life; the world will end by her causing the conditions for the Apocalypse).

There’s a strange kind of resonance I suspect many authors have discovered. Similarities emerge between writers when they write about a similar theme. As you write, you discover the same entities and challenges. To put it another way, when you work with the stuff Tolkien delved into, you come face to face with the same Balrog, regardless of whether you’ve read Tolkien or not. It’s not a case of copying; it’s a case of working with the archetypes that lurk in the place writers find themselves in. So I appreciate that what Donaldson is attempting to work with here is extremely difficult: gods, mages with staggering powers, doom and apocalypse, and the meaningful culmination of story arcs from two trilogies with many potent characters.

The opening is definitely not designed to cater for mainstream readers. When you compare it to something like Mordant’s Need, it’s plain that Donaldson knows how to write a cracking opening scene, but has chosen not to. I know we are well into a series here, but I would have still made some kind of concession to engage readers. For pages and pages we must endure the introspective exposition that is Covenant’s trademark, his fractured, floundering grasp on reality, then Linden’s self-doubt, and piles of explanation.
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I loved the first Chronicles and applauded the second. The third Chronicles began in a cunning way, and I was eager to be swept away into the Land once again. But this book, Fatal Revenant, dragged at my heels.

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It could be cut by 400 pages and still tell the same story, and the excessive use of anachronistic (damn, he’s doing it to me too now, I mean to say old) and downright obscure adjectives highlight the problem: Donaldson insists on telling us exactly what every single thing means, and every possible outcome, repeatedly, with painful precision. There is no space to wonder, to guess; to fill in the blanks in the writing: to be amazed.

In the earlier books I enjoyed the poetry of the Land, the way the atmosphere of the story made me feel. There was a special beauty to the fact that the world was a dream-world which Covenant did not believe in. It was real but unreal–that ambiguity was essential to the magic of the book.

But now the Land has become too real or too defined to be believable. Being the only world that exists for the lead character, it becomes a stock-fantasy story and reads like a fictionalised role-playing game with staged combat scenes. The plotting is arduous, with character motivations analysed so often that I became suspicious of the plot. I knew that if I stopped to think about it, I’d see that the characters probably wouldn’t do what they were doing unless the author had insisted that they did. It doesn’t ring true.

There are some high-points, great fantasy inventions, wonderful wizardry and moments when Donaldson works his old magic to good effect, but on the whole I found I couldn’t empathise with Linden Avery. I just didn’t care what she did.

Fatal Revenant also has tons of back-story. It’s a classic case of ‘show don’t tell’ gone wrong. I can’t believe that anything Donaldson writes is accidental, but he has perhaps over-analysed this manuscript, filling it with reminders, patches and information readers ‘should know’. This exposition drags the whole series down. Linden is so insecure and uncertain. She is a woman of shallow emotions who is rather desperate as a heroine. The Extended Unabridged Chronicles of Linden Avery, the Chosen has become too tiresome for me.